ID that mysterious tune

The beauty of jailbroken iPhones is the ability for developers to demonstrate the amazing potential of native iPhone apps, inducing the salivation of mouths throughout the techie world. And indeed, some incredible examples of mobile possibilities have already hit the interwebs, like the neat-o PlayStation emulator I wrote about before.

And they keep on coming: Erica Sadun, one of the most prominent names in iPhone cracking, put together Listen, an insanely sweet app that lets you identify songs playing on the radio by putting your iPhone up to the speaker. It listens to the tune for ten or so seconds, then displays its name, album, and artist info. A friend of mine tested it and said it worked “really well,” ID’ing a song from Dropkick Murphys’ album, The Meanest of Times, which has only been out since September.

If this isn’t evidence enough that 3rd-party apps for the iPhone could effectively be its most attractive feature, I don’t know what is. Here’s hoping Apple isn’t characteristically stingy with who gets access to the SDK — some of the most innovative stuff comes from the independent, little-guy dev who whips up code in his free time, just for the hell of it.

Category: Hacking, Software

Posted by Dan Pourhadi on Jan 9 2008, 4:00 PM ET

• © 2007 Mac Publishing, LLC.
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service
• Community Standards